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Promethean slumped again. In the old days I would have immediately doubled up and bought more on its earlier slump, but I’m not very wary indeed.
Instead I planned to wait again but instead took a dab more, rather than a full clip as my old confidence bubbled up a bit.
Of course if the market turns then the recoveries will be huge. This is the gambit, but it is an increasingly dicey and volatile one.
Many companies are simply getting stolen and the market is showing itself to becoming increasingly dysfunctional.
When market moves don’t make sense these days you just wait a few months for the real news to come out and it suddenly they story is crystal clear: while the shareholders are being lied to the inner circle is clued in.
In the past there were 3rd parties ready to jump in and interrupt the show and private equity companies would compete to buy the company. Now the companies are getting stolen and the shareholders are getting robbed without the slightest intent to pay them their dues.
The old Marconi deal has set a formula where the city gets the company for nothing but a 1p per share whilst certain “stakeholders”, whoever they may be invented to be, clean up.
It is the fault of the pension funds that they don’t intervene, but they don’t step in a stop these heists. They are lazy and stupid, this much we know from our collective pension performances.
Friday was a good day in the markets and for the portfolio which is slowly but surely climbing up. The performance looks quite like the FTSE 100 which I’m unhappy about as it suggests my theme is highly market correlated, something I don’t enjoy as a contrarian.
However it has beta which means when it’s good it’s very good. Promethean pulled it down but the portfolio was still 1% in the black on the day. This underlines for the umpteenth time that you must have a portfolio, and how nice it is to have one! Diversification is your friend.
I started dipping my toes back into the market last August and having played around with my spread sheet it appears I’m up about 12% after costs on my stock positions in that time. That feels like a hell of a lot of risk for a relatively poor return by the standards of the last decade.
The fact it is about double the FTSE 100 return doesn’t make me feel any happier. It’s perhaps the general nastiness of the environment rather than a low score that makes me feel glum; the market is just hard gritty work.
